A Stop Horseracing Article from All-Creatures.org

Churchill Downs Released 'Low-hanging Fruit' Safety Rules after 12 Deaths

FROM Tuesday's Horse
June 2023

New rules are not for safety. They had the public, the national media paying attention. They had to come up with something—'Ok, here's what we're doing to change things'—so it looks like they're doing something different... nothing to help the Horses of course. 

Excerps from original article By Stephanie Kuzydym, June 30, 2023, Louisville Courier Journal:

Tommy Vance’s cell phone continued to buzz in his hand. “This is someone else who saw the news and wants to know why,” he said. State veterinarians had scratched two of the three horses he shipped to Ellis Park for the relocated Churchill Downs Spring Meet. Racing hadn’t even started.

Vance, a third-generation horse trainer, spent the morning responding to owners who wanted to know why Catty Cruise, a chestnut filly, and Wesleyan, a dark bay gelding, were scratched.

It’s been an ever-changing eight weeks for trainers who race thoroughbreds in Kentucky. Eleven of them lost horses in just over a month at Churchill Downs.

The deaths of the Derby dozen put a spotlight on the already highly-regulated job trainers do, which for the last 20 years has called for a decrease in race-day medications and an increase in testing to the picograms, or one trillionth of a gram. “That’s like finding a grain of salt in a swimming pool,” a horse veterinarian told the Courier Journal.

Then, Churchill—the very track trainers grew up loving and still publicly adore — put out new safety initiatives all aimed at the horses and horsemen. This is despite the fact that they don’t know what caused the deaths and had two track experts analyze the famed dirt following concerns.

The initiatives took away money, restricted starts and provided more standards for a horse’s poor performance.

“These initiatives were the low-hanging fruit. It’s something Churchill could push out easy and institute immediately,” a source with intimate knowledge of the backside at Churchill Downs told The Courier Journal.

Churchill Downs did not respond to multiple Courier Journal interview requests about the safety initiatives.

More than a dozen trainers, who regularly work horses on the backside of Churchill Downs, wonder what the “safety initiatives” really protect.

“It’s not for safety,” said Wayne Catalano, a three-time Breeders’ Cup-winning trainer. “They had the public, the national media paying attention. They had to come up with something—‘Ok, Here’s what we’re doing to change things’—to look like they’re doing something different.

---

Return to Stop Horseracing